Word: snidely
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JOHN BOORMAN'S Leo the Last also begins interestingly, if not well, with an overlaid rock song alluding to the action and some surreal flip-flopping between polite conversation and snide establishing narration, designed simultaneously to let the audience know the situation and to let it know it's being told deliberately. This low-level reflexiveness doesn't succeed in really challenging the naturalistic tradition...
...column called "Carol Says," then moved on to interviews with the likes of Vice President Johnson and a new quarterback named Joe Namath. Reviews, always glib and sometimes perceptive, criticized books, plays, movies, TV shows, restaurants and (lately) Sunday church services. "Eye" and "Eye Too," gossip columns on the snide side, became must reading on the East Side and elsewhere. Pages were regularly filled with features and with candid-camera shots of BPs going in and out of smart restaurants...
...scenarist wife Eleanor have a bad habit of taking important themes and mashing them into pulp. They did it with mental illness (David and Lisa) and youth and violence (Last Summer). Now, with Diary of a Mad Housewife, they have reduced the agonies of middle-class marriage to a snide, skin-deep Cosmopolitan-style short story of social climbing and terribly sophisticated adultery...
...draft board does not like me Mrs.-, the fifty-five-year-old secretary and dottering mainstay of the board, continually answers my snide inquiries and diatribes with short formal notes on mimeographed forms. I don't even have the satisfaction that they take my hate notes seriously. They claim they simply administer the system, following directives from Washington. But they are humorless, and totally without compassion...
...imagination without you ever realizing how it all came about. The style and general format of the novel are easy and without interruption; yet somehow, amid the general flow of things, realities are contorted, perspectives tiltcrazily, and the whole tone of the novel can shuttle back and forth from snide humor to outright malevolence. "All is jive," says Mr. Jiveass Nigger, and from the beginning of the book until its end, you're never quite sure if you might not just be the one who's being jived...